


and sung me moon-struck

by millepertuis



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Setting, Dubious Morality, F/F, Post-Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-09
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2021-01-26 06:03:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21369352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/millepertuis/pseuds/millepertuis
Summary: “I can’t believe she fucking cursed me.”“I know,” Elena agrees. “What a dick.”
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 2
Kudos: 45
Collections: Femslash Exchange 2019





	and sung me moon-struck

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Alfer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alfer/gifts).

> i saw you liked magical AUs and my mind ran away from me, i hope you like this
> 
> title from Sylvia Plath's (dare i say it?) villanelle, _Mad Girl's Love Song_

Eve doesn’t remember being found and brought to a hospital. A fucking Muggle hospital, what the fuck. They spend three days digging around her insides trying to close her up and have it stick before the Embassy gets a clue and sends a Healer over.

It takes a few hours more after that before Eve sees a familiar face.

“I can’t believe she fucking cursed me.”

“I know,” Elena agrees. “What a dick.”

Eve eyes her, but her flesh still hasn’t finished knitting back together, and she can’t be bothered.

“Is Carolyn pissed at me?”

Elena winces. “Ah, you know, who can ever tell what she’s thinking?”

Eve clutches at her face. “Merlin, what was _I_ thinking?”

“Can’t tell you.”

“I’ve lost my job, _again_, a bunch of Muggle doctors have sewn me up about half a dozen times, my husband left me—do you know, he’s not even taking my calls?”

“Ah,” Elena says awkwardly. “About that.”

“His wand?”

“Used to cast a Killing Curse.”

“Of course. What did she do to his memories?”

“There are traces of a Sleeping Potion in his blood.”

“Which has the convenient side effect of wiping about half an hour of someone’s memory.”

“Yeah.”

“So it looks like he had an argument with his mistress, killed her and then drank the potion to cover his tracks.”

“Or—well, or maybe he did kill her.”

“No,” Eve sighs. “No, he’d never do that.”

Elena raises her eyebrows at her. “Alright, try maybe to sound less disappointed about that.”

“Oh, shut up.”

Meeting with Carolyn goes as well as expected.

“I rather like you, Eve. I find you interesting. And, more to the point, useful. But I’m not sure where your priorities are. Or rather, I’m afraid I do know what they are.” She pauses. “Do you want to fuck her?”

“What! She just cursed me and left me for dead!”

“Yes. Do you want to fuck her?”

“No!”

Carolyn hums. She doesn’t sound particularly convinced. “Do you want to kill her?”

“Do you know what a catheter is?” Eve lies back on the bed. “Ask me tomorrow.”

Eve does not get invited back to her job.

At least she does get sent back to England.

The house—The house is fine. Quiet. Empty.

She keeps catching ghosts of her former life at the corner of her vision—that ugly tea set from Nico’s grandmother, his arm chair, the pack of Bill’s cigs usually on her coffee table—gone before she can turn around. Gone all along.

And Villanelle—Villanelle who’s only ever been here twice—

_What the fuck are you doing, Eve?_ Nico asked, when he picked up his things. He didn’t even sound angry anymore, just tired.

Eve didn’t have an answer for him.

Villanelle’s perfume lingers everywhere. Eve looks around her house and sees—she sees the piece of art Villanelle made a face at, that posh asshole, the knit cover she ran her hand over. Eve expects her there, dressed in a widow’s garb again, every time she opens her door.

It’s not the house that Villanelle is haunting, of course. It’s Eve.

Eve is just so fucking bored.

Then, of course, she finds the painting.

“Bill gave you a portrait of himself? Wait, Bill had a portrait of himself made?”

Eve can’t quite tell what expression her face is making, what with the fire cracking around Elena’s head in the chimney, but she sounds doubtful.

“His wife sent it to me.”

“Oh, that’s nice.”

“I don’t think she meant it as a gift,” Eve says darkly.

She found the painting propped up against a wall in the living room, still wrapped. She doesn’t remember anything about it, so maybe Nico got it sometime recently.

But Eve wasn’t very clear-minded, after the funeral. Her mind was—sharp as blade, in her search for Villanelle, but most of the rest still remains fuzzy in her memory.

She called it grief, then. Now she’s not so sure. All the things that once seemed so important—her favorite mug, her _marriage_, the whole routine of her life—

“Well,” Bill says, taking on that paternalistic tone he would to put on sometimes, “it’s no mystery, really. You can’t stand to be bored, and you’re, well, you’re really quite macabre, aren’t you?”

Eve takes another swig of Firewhiskey and spills half of it down her shirt. “Fuck.” She wipes at her chest for a minute before she gives up and slumps back on the couch. “Maybe I just wasn’t meant for this line of work,” she says.

Bill smiles inside the painting. “Maybe it’s exactly what you were meant for.”

The phone rings in the middle of the night.

“Hello? Hello? Is this Eve Polastri? Can Eve Polastri hear me?”

Eve strongly considers hanging up for half a minute. “You don’t need to shout,” she says eventually. “I can hear you just fine.”

“Ah. Well, how am I supposed to know with these things?”

“Didn’t you grow up in a Muggle orphanage?”

Tone definitely sulky, “They didn’t have phones then.”

“Why didn’t you just use a two-way mirror or something?”

“But then you’d see where I am, and you’d come and stab me in my sleep.”

Eve snorts. “You’d deserve it.”

“Oh, so it’s fine when you try to kill me, but I can’t try to kill you?”

“Yes!”

There’s a beat of silence.

“You’re alive, then.” Villanelle’s voice has gone very quiet.

_Are you happy about that?_ Eve wonders.

_Does it even matter?_

She closes her eyes and leans back into her pillow. “No thanks to you,” she says.

It’s raining outside.

She can hear rain on the other side of the line, too. Villanelle could be anywhere in the world, or she could be right here. Maybe if Eve goes to her door and opens it, she’ll find her on the other side, hanging up the phone like the love interest of a twisted romantic comedy, and they’ll kill each other or fuck each other and it won’t matter anyway, one act of passion or the other, all coming from the same place.

It probably shouldn’t be coming from the same place.

Eve starts looking again, inevitably.

A hired killer stabbed through the eye with his own wand in Milan.

A woman with dark, thick hair found in a Parisian hotel with her heart carved out.

Eve dreams about it, about a strange owl bringing her a package, and when she opens it, there’s a warm, beating heart inside.

“Where do you see this going?” Bill asks her, watching her flit about the room and pin gruesome pictures and Muggle camera surveillance photos on the pan of wall she’s cleared out.

It’s a question Eve still doesn’t have an answer for.

In her dreams, when Eve finds the beating heart, she brings it to her mouth, blood dripping down her hands, and eats it whole.

Villanelle keeps calling. “Are you still angry with me?” she’ll say, or, “I’ve left a gift for you.”

The gifts are mostly dead people.

“What are you wearing?” she asks one night.

“I’m not telling you that.”

Villanelle sighs a little. Eve imagines how it would feel, that little puff of breath, over her ear, over her neck.

“It’s probably terrible anyway. You have bad taste in clothes. I wish you’d let me—” There’s a hitch in her voice.

“Dress me up?”

“Yes. I like to think about dressing you. Almost as much as I like to think about undressing you.”

Eve should hang up.

Eve should do a lot of things.

It would be easier if it were about sex. Bill might find it funny, that the woman who made Eve question her sexuality for the first time is the hired killer who murdered him. He likes—He liked the darkest jokes the most, dead babies joke and all that shit. He might have found it funny. He might have forgiven her—might not have thought there is anything to forgive in that, in basic human attraction.

But it's not about that, is it? It's not about sex, or Eve's sexuality crisis, or her marriage. It's not about anything easy or convenient or anything that she might easily get over with if only by giving into it.

Everything Eve's learned about Villanelle has only ever made her want to learn more. 

“I kept thinking about you,” Villanelle tells her, a little drowsy. “After the hospital. I didn’t know who you were, but I thought about you. I thought about finding you somehow, how I’d pretend to be—a flight attendant, maybe or… I don’t know, something interesting. And of course you would fall madly in love with me and you would want to know everything about me. It would have been very annoying.”

“Did you fall in love back?”

“No,” Villanelle says. “I didn't imagine I could. I never have before, you know, not really.”

“I did read your letters to Anna, you know.”

“Oh, well, Anna,” Villanelle says dismissively. 

“You liked her enough to murder her husband,” Eve says, trying very hard not to sound jealous.

“Doesn't everyone go a little mad over their first crush?”

Eve is following up on a lead in Berlin. She’s sitting with a hundred strangers in a hall in the German Ministry, waiting for the appointment she got with the Auror department using credentials she no longer has.

The woman next to her lets out a little cough, then a louder, more pointed one. Eve looks over at her and—

A pulse of not-quite-pain goes through the scar on Eve’s stomach.

She’s beautiful, of course, young, white, thin. Her hair is too dark, the lines of her face all wrong, her glittering eyes—

Eve looks away. She thinks about doing a lot of things she does not do.

After a while, fingers brush against hers where her hand rests on the bench.

Eve, holding her breath, lets their fingers entangle and does not think about when they’ll have to let go.

Before Carolyn came along and whisked her into the Department of Mysteries, Eve was an analyst in the Auror Department. She’s seen murders by the dozen; professional hits, too, some even committed by witches.

What makes Villanelle different?

She wears her skin more loosely than anyone Eve has ever seen. She wears wigs as often as charms, and never spells herself into a situation she can talk herself into.

She has mastered spells in half a dozen languages, though she almost never casts in her own.

She’s never used a Killing Curse.

She likes playing games.

What makes Villanelle different?

“I can’t stand it, when you’re not thinking about me,” Villanelle tells her over the phone, voice hushed like a teenager telling secrets at a sleepover, covers drawn over their heads so the morning light can’t reach them.

Eve gets under the covers too. She closes her eyes and imagines Villanelle there with her in that small pocket of warmth, so close they almost touch, so close they can almost hear each other’s heart.

What makes Villanelle different?

When Eve walked through the long hallways of the Department of Mysteries, past all its still locked doors and enigmas—

In this place where all her papered-over ambitions could come true—

Eve still could only think of her.

It turns out Eve likes playing games, too.

Villanelle is very careful: she dumps the bodies of Hitwizards all over the world, and doesn’t kill anybody else.

She’s very careful, but she likes expensive, rare, pretty things, and Eve is very good at her job.

It’s not Alaska, in the end, but Siberia.

She waits for Villanelle in her kitchen in Novosibirsk. She doesn’t look through the place, wary there may be more protection spells inside than those she’s circumvented to come in. She sits at the table and tries to stay still as she waits. The table is ridiculously long, but it’s made of cedar wood, the same as Eve’s wand. It feels soothing under her hands.

She has to recast her warming spell twice before Villanelle comes home.

“Eve,” she says. “I wasn’t expecting you today.” She stays by the door, as relaxed as a Manticore that is not quite hungry.

Eve pulls two glasses from her pocket and sets them on the table.

They’re cheap, ugly little things meant for Muggle children that she bought at the corner store. She didn’t remember to bring some, and it turns out Russian Muggles don’t use the same currency as British ones. She bargained for these glasses with the clerk by dropping ten-pound notes on the counter until he agreed to let her take them. There are little ducks badly painted on the side.

It’s occurring to Eve now that she might have transfigured the notes, or confunded the clerk.

She takes out the same hangover potion twice before she manages to find the right flask in her pocket. She pours half of it in each glass, then spells one of them over to the other side of the table.

Then she throws her wand in the middle of the table, out of easy reach.

She can feel Villanelle staring at her, willing Eve to look at her, a crackle of magic over the room, along Eve’s spine.

Eve does not look at her. She keeps her eyes on the table and reaches for her own glass. “I won’t force you to drink,” she says, and she brings it to her lips and drinks until it is empty.

Villanelle steps forward all at once and grabs the second glass. She downs the potion in one gulp, and dumps the glass back on the table. After another second, she throws her one wand next to Eve’s and sits down.

Eve can’t help but look at her then.

Villanelle crosses her arms over her chest and lifts her chin up. “Well?”

“We wait for it to take effect.”

Villanelle frowns and licks her lips. “Veritaserum?”

“Yes,” Eve says. “Were you expecting poison?”

She shrugs a little. “It would have been more interesting.”

“What, murder-suicide gets your rocks off?”

“It might,” Villanelle says, sulky. “It’s a bit romantic, isn’t it?”

“It isn’t!”

“Of course it is. I don’t want to live without you. I don’t want you to live without me.”

Eve has stabbed her. She likes to remember it. She likes to think of the scar that the cursed silver knife must have left on Villanelle.

Now Eve has a scar of her own, too.

What did she think they would do? Hide away somewhere to play house? Like Villanelle wouldn’t have bored of it in a month? Like Eve wouldn’t have?

What does she think they’re going to do?

“What do you want to ask me, then?” Villanelle asks.

“Do you want to kill me?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you want to kill me now?”

Villanelle smiles. “No. Do you want to kill me?”

“Sometimes.”

Villanelle smiles again. Eve smiles back.

“Are you going to kill me today?”

“I don’t think so.”

Eve had a list of questions she wanted to ask, and questions she couldn’t bear to ask.

_Do you think about me as much as I think about you? _ _Do you love me? Do you understand what love is?_

_Do I?_

“What do you know about the Twelves?”

“Enough that they have sent people to kill me.”

Eve throws a look around as though she might spot a Hitwizard poking their head out from the cauldron in the hearth.

“There is no need to worry about that,” Villanelle says. “They cannot find me if I do not want to be found.”

“_I _found you.”

“But they are not you,” Villanelle says. Her eyes are warm.

A blue shock of magic reverberates through the room—a tripped warning spell.

Eve jumps to her feet.

Villanelle waves a hand at her. “It is fine, settle down. That’s the outer perimeter, pigeons trip it all the time. It is very annoy—” Her voice breaks off as they feel the ward break.

Eve and Villanelle stare at each other, then throw themselves at their wands.

In the scramble, the two wands roll off and under the table; Eve bumps her head.

A red ray light flies over Villanelle’s head.

They throw themselves under the table.

“I’m not killing anybody with an axe,” Eve warns.

Villanelle makes a face. She grabs her wand and immediately throws a curse back. “Why would I have an axe?” she asks Eve. “What am I, a lumberjack?”

Eve finds her own wand and bumps her head again. “Fuck!” She throws up a shield. “I’m not killing anybody with anything else either!”

“Oh, so it’s fine to stab _me_, but not other people?”

“Will you get over that!”

After, Villanelle takes nothing from her house. Eve herself has taken a bunch of useless shit from her own, and Bill’s portrait that she shoved in her pocket alongside the rest. He’s going to be pissed at her for that if nothing else.

“What the hell are we going to do?” she asks Villanelle, looking around at the ruined furniture and curse marks on the walls.

Villanelle grins at her. There’s a smudge of blood on her cheek. “I have no idea,” she says. “Doesn’t that make your blood hum?”

It does; she does.

For today at least, Eve decides she wouldn’t go back for all the Wizarding World.

“Come on,” Villanelle says, taking her hand. “Anywhere in the world. Where do you want to go?”


End file.
